I've been hearing a lot lately from friends and relatives about various age-related or partially age-related health problems they're encountering. And then I share my own health problems back! I guess I'm at that stage of life when this is par for the course. Combined with that are the deaths of famous people from my childhood or youth, like Richard Simmons, Bob Newhart, Dr. Ruth, etc. And then President Biden steps away from the presidential campaign after lots of loud questions about his ability to govern at his age. (I'm not going to go into political commentary here.)
Not sure what point I'm trying to make here, if any. Just that this is on my mind these days.
Got back from a short trip to find these two books that I ordered from 博客來 books:
移工築起的地下社會：跨國勞動在臺灣 (Underground Lives: Stories Untold for Migrant Workers in Taiwan), by 簡永達 (2023)
冷戰下的「臺灣研究」：北美人類學家訪問紀錄 (Studying Taiwan Before Taiwan Studies: American Anthropologists in Cold War Taiwan), edited by Derek Sheridan, Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang, and Tseng Wen-liang (2024)
The latter is in both English and Chinese, so I'll probably be reading that first. But before that, I have a lot of work to catch up on...
This was produced in 2020, but I didn't see it back then. It's pretty interesting. I learned a bit more about higher education during the Japanese colonial period and the martial law period.
I don't agree with some of the information in the video, though. They said that Soochow University was the first private university in Taiwan, but according to Wikipedia, it wasn't actually fully certified as a university until 1971. Classes started at Tunghai University in 1955, though for some reason, Tunghai isn't mentioned in this video.
This week I was supposed to be attending (and presenting at!) the 2024 North American Taiwan Studies Association conference in NYC, but I bowed out in May due to too many other commitments. Turned out that it's lucky I did because last week I had a nasty encounter with some poison ivy that is currently making my life miserable. But I felt a bit bad when I read through the conference handbook and saw how interesting it was going to be. It looks like one of those very rare conferences (in my experience) where I would like to attend almost every session! Ah well...
I have some money left over from my professional development fund for this fiscal year, so I bought a few more books that I thought might be helpful to my research.* Here they are:
Rhet Ops: Rhetoric and Information Warfare, edited by Jim Ridolfo and William Hart-Davidson (2019) After Hart-Davidson's recent death, I read an obituary that mentioned this book. It looked interesting.
Buying all these books has me wondering, though, what I'll do with them down the line. I've been following Kurt Bell on Twitter recently; he and his wife are retiring and moving to Japan. They decided that they could only take a total of 6 boxes of belongings with them, and this has me thinking about what I'll do with all my books if I get to that point in life. Maybe I can eventually donate these books to a library or organization (or person?) interested in Taiwan. Anyway, I think I have a few years before I get to that point.
The first speaker, GTI Deputy Director John Dotson, traced the theory back to 1979 when the US changed recognition from the Republic of China (Taiwan) to the People's Republic of China. While he doesn't say this is the origin of the theory, he does suggest that the theory has its origins partly in Taiwan's own feelings of being betrayed by the U.S. His main focus, though, is on how the CCP is using and amplifying this theory to drive a wedge between Taiwan and the United States. IORG Co-Director Chihhao Yu also spends a lot of time on PRC propaganda in relation to US skepticism, but he also suggests that the Taiwanese abandonment narrative has its roots in Taiwan's history as a colony, going as far back as 400 years ago.
One thing that I haven't heard so far is the possible connection between skepticism about America's actions/stance toward Taiwan and what George H. Kerr argued was the US "betrayal" of Taiwanese during the early postwar years. Kerr's argument in Formosa Betrayed is not just that the Kuomintang takeover of Taiwan was a betrayal of the hopes of the Taiwanese people for a just and equitable post-war society as they became part of the Chinese nation; it was also that the United States betrayed Taiwan by allowing the KMT to continue to rule Taiwan despite its corruption, incompetence, and authoritarian rule during the White Terror period. Kerr argues that the US took a hands-off position toward what was happening in Taiwan; as he relates, after he met with the director of Office of Far Eastern Affairs in March, 1947, the latter showed him the door "with remarks to the effect that no one in the United Nations and certainly no one in Washington would ever be interested in Formosa."
Kerr watched as the US government continued to support Taiwan's KMT rulers ... until it didn't. When Nixon and Kissinger visited China, Kerr told Richard Koo that he thought Chiang Ching-kuo would use the opportunity to sell out Taiwan and that "Nixon will welcome any arrangement Chiang Ching-kuo will make -- or probably has made -- to hand Formosa over to Peking without a public international intervention or conflict of any sort. ... The interests of the Formosans are of no importance to him [Nixon] if they stand in the way of his ambition" (3 Aug. 1971). Later he described US/China interactions to Mark Mancall as the US presidents "go[ing] hat in hand to 'pay tribute'" (9 Feb. 1975).
And I have quoted many times Chen Rongcheng's afterword (1973)/preface (1991) to the Chinese translation of Formosa Betrayed, where he wrote, ｢人不先自救，誰會救我？｣(“If we do not first help ourselves, who will save us?”) To Chen, it seemed that one of the messages of Formosa Betrayed was not to trust the US too much.
This is not to deny anything that the panelists had to say. It's interesting, though, to speculate on whether the "America Skepticism Theory" might have some of its roots among people who themselves were advocating for Taiwan independence, and who feared being betrayed once again if they depended too much on the US. And that included Kerr himself, who increasingly despaired of the chances that his country would do the "right" thing for Taiwan.
This is another episode of 台灣演義 that has English subtitles. It goes through the history of Taiwan and its changing status under different colonial regimes, up through postwar Taiwan. A nice summary of the reasons Taiwan is in such a conflicted state. (Hmmm... that would make a nice title: Conflicted State...)
